Endgame DPS/Mechanics Guide Reborn

Post by Garry

Hello everyone! This guide is a continuation of leth's "How do I shot bow?: Endgame DPS/Mechanics Guide". You will see a lot of the same information here as in his last thread as well as some other threads.This thread needs a lot of critiquing so please comment and give me feedback and post corrections. Thank you.

Beast Mastery DPS/Raid Spechttp://www.wowhead.com/?talent=ctbMztxRwu0esx0eVooZLSome of you may find this spec a little controversial because this is a little different then some common DPS/Raid Specs that you have seen recently. For example This Talent Tree. I agree with most of the talents on here. I did however change a few things which I will go over later. For more information on shot rotations enchants etc.. Navigate farther down the page.

Improved Tacking 4/5The reason we put 4/5 in here instead of putting 2 points into Improved Stings is because Improved tracking increases ALL ranged DPS where as Improved Stings only targets your stings. Note that since patch 3.0.8 was released when you’re tracking one of them whether it be Beasts, Demons, Dragonkin, Elementals, Giants, Humanoids, and Undead will give you the damage increase to all of them. So as long as your tracking one of them. Your DPS will be increased vs all of them.

Improve Mend PetNow even a while back I thought "What in the heck is the purpose of this. I could use this talent point where it would improve my DPS. Well it's important to keep you’re pet alive we all know that. So when your pet is getting pounded by spells or may have a disease on him. Healers in raids won't even think about healing your pet. They are way to preoccupied with the raid members. IMP will allow you to have a chance on cleansing your pet, as well as reducing the mana cost. Which we all know is fantastic because this will decrease the time in Viper!

Frenzy 4/5Now i'm about to tell you why Frenzy 4/5 and not 5/5. If you know the answer that's great! But this is for the people who don't. So some of you may ask "Why only 4/5 Frenzy? It looks like an amazing DPS boost!" Well let me tell you. Frenzy 4/5 gives your pet an 80% chance to have a 30% attack speed increase for 8 seconds after dealing a critical strike. Well chances are your pet will Crit every 4-5 seconds maybe even less. So to prevent the buff from "over applying" itself we only put 4/5 Frenzy to avoid wasting a talent point. This applies to other talents too, EG: GFTT and Expose Weakness

No Beast Mastery!With the latest patch(3.0.8) Exotic pets were nerfed incredibly. The DPS difference between an Exotic pet and a normal Raptor or Cat was so small it was deprecated and considered a worthless talent point. If you were to spec into it you would only be doing so for the look of your pet. It would be worth it to spend the talent point elsewhere.

Marksmanship DPS/Raid Spechttp://www.wowhead.com/?talent=ctbMzZ0eVfoAzMxoxhAox00bThis talent tree has been slightly modified and updated for the highest possible DPS. This is a different example of Marksmanship. You will be able to see the changes made and below I will explain the reasons I made the changes.

Unleashed Fury was removed in order to make points available for Survival Instincts 2/2, Improved Steady Shot and Efficiency. Unleashed Fury increases your pets damage. This is really the last thing you need because your main DPS source is your bow/gun. Killerrabbit disagrees with me on this. I respect his opinion and you may spec how ever you wish but when I tested my DPS there was a different out come each time. First time my spec was putting out more DPS second time his did more DPS. It went on and off like this. I had about 6 trials. I averaged out my results and my spec did do more DPS but the difference was so minor it doesn't really matter unless you're really nit picky.

No Silencing ShotThe reason for not getting this is because most of the time it is worthless in raids because the targeted NPC will be immune to silencing affects and it does not do substantial DPS to be included into the shot rotation. However this spell would benefit for PVP.

Survival Trap Dancing Spechttp://www.wowhead.com/?talent=coZ0eVbohZtb0i0fIhxdAbodThis spec for obvious reason(EG the name) is a Trap dancing spec. This means that your the hunter that traps in instances and raids. Now I don't prefer this spec but some say this spec does just as much or more DPS then the first Survival Spec.

Savage Strikes. On occasion when you are trapping or kiting NPC's you will come into melee combat. This talent just assists in you keeping aggro so you can pull the NPC into your trap.

Survival Tactics. This talent is primarily taken for the reduced chanced for you enemy's to resist your traps. This is a core talent in that it makes the trap chance higher. Which is what Trap Dancing is all about.

Trap Mastery Frost Trap and Freezing Trap - Increases the duration by 30%. Immolation and Explosive Trap - Increases the periodic damage done by 30%. Snake Trap - Increases the number of snakes summoned by 30%. This is a core talent for the reason that it will keep your trapped target trapped longer, which is fantastic because that give you and your party/raid group more time to be killing other NPC's/adds!

Endgame Grinding/Farming Spechttp://www.wowhead.com/?talent=cVbhzggRwzhesx0eVboThis spec shows you how how to spec correctly into your talent tree if you want the best and fasted farming possible. It is way more pet reliable giving your pet most of the attributes allowing it to hold 3 or 4 NPC's at the same time. Killing them at a much faster pace putting more gold in your pocket.

Important Talents

Endurance Training. This will give your pet much more health and making it more susceptible to taking hits, increasing your time in combat.

Improved Mend Pet. This will decrease the mana cost of your mend pet spell. Reducing the time your in viper and decreasing the amount of times you will have to drink for mana. Also has a chance on tick of cleansing 1 Curse, Disease, Magic or Poison effect.

Go for the Throat 2/2. You will normally see this 1/2 but in this case we want are pet to have as much focus available all the time to ensure are pets hold aggro and also increasing there DPS substantially.

Post by Garry

III. Professions

It's smartest to take two gathering professions to make the most money until you are financially secure; that is, until you are 80 and have bought your epic flying mount and have enough money, resources, and income left over to finance the cost of raids in addition to being able to finance the replacement of one or both of your professions according to the following recommendations. The two smartest gathering professions till 80 would be herbalism and mining. I'll normally try and devote 12 hours of gathering a week at least. Now its impossible to track both herbs and mineral veins at the same time. But these to macros make it much easier to switch on and off.Track Herbs) /use Find HerbsTrack Minerals) /use Find MineralsIts best then for those macros to have key bindings and then just switch on and off between tracking.

Blacksmithing tops out at an extra 80 AP net gain through extra bracer and glove sockets, when epic gems are inserted. ...But those don't exist yet. With rare gems, the gain is 64 AP, equal to Alchemy, Enchanting, LW, and Inscription, as below. However, these sockets do leave room for Agility-equivalent gems for Survival.

Jewelcrafting allows you to equip up to 3 special prismatic gems, a net benefit of 66 AP over rare equivalents, or 42 AP over epic equivalents. Again, the epic ones are not attainable yet, so for now, JC is a better idea than anything else; when epic gems do debut, it will become less of a good idea. But since they're prismatic, you aren't required to put in a crappy blue gem to satisfy your meta, so you get a small gain there too (minus desirable socket bonuses with blue sockets that you would have taken anyway), making it slightly better than Herbalism right now. Also, there are Agility-equivalent gems for Survival.

Herbalism comes in third with 66.7 AP on average along with a weak self heal, this can however be usefull in raids. Use on boss fights when ever its up to give the healers less to worry about.

Alchemy, Enchanting, Leatherworking, and Inscription each have a net benefit of 64 AP, a tie for a close fourth to Herbalism, but these benefits are all passive at the cost of 2.7 AP relative to Herbalism.

Engineering's value is variable, with gadgets and gear and Engineer-only enchants (which are lame for Hunter DPS) being used situationally, but it's something Hunters should consider with ammunition making, Jumper Cables (we are the class that can make use of them with the greatest consistency), an ilvl 200 epic helm, etc.

*Fire Leaf shares a cooldown with some or all explosives, combat pets, and/or other useless cooldowns.

IV. Gear and Items, part 0

Mini-article: The hit cap

One can ensure that they never miss a shot by improving their chance to hit. One's pet behaves in the same way. Need to know - the hit cap is 263 or 8% without Focused Aim. Focused Aim in no way causes crit deppresion. Some of you may have heard this. In fact it is nonsense.

How is chance to hit calculated?It's more accurate to say that your chance to miss is what is being calculated. Your chance to miss is a function of your weapon skill and the target's defense skill. (Both of these skills appear on the Skills tab of your character sheet, default keybinding "K.") These are just numbers that reflect how good you are with your weapon and how good you are at not getting hit by other weapons, respectively. The maximum is always 5 times your level. At level 80, this means that maximum skill is 400. It is clearly in your best interest to get relevant skills to 400 as soon as possible. To do this, simply engage in combat using the weapon whose skill you want to improve (or get hit by physical attacks, in the case of defense skill) until it increases. You may have to engage mobs closer to your level in order to achieve the higher skill levels.

All discussion about the hit cap assumes maximum weapon skill. All enemies and NPCs (including your pet) have all weapon and defense skill

IV. Gear and Items, part 1

a) FAQ:

Leather or mail?Use whichever gives you the better overall DPS. However, the main advantage to using mail is Intellect; you get AP from it through the Careful Aim talent, and the more Int you have, the less time overall you spend with Aspect of the Viper on. Most of the time, mail will be the better idea. If you're gonna aim for leather, be kind to Rogues and Druids and let them have leather first, since they can't use the mail that was designed for you.

Dual Wield or 2-hander?Use whichever gives you the better overall DPS. The only difference is enchants. Trapdancing specs will prefer 2 handers due to actually using them once every 24 seconds.

Bow, gun, or crossbow?Use whichever gives you the better overall DPS. If you're a Troll, pretend that Bows all have 45.9 crit rating on them (for Dwarves, the same with Guns).

Slow or fast ranged weapon? The difference is fairly small. Faster weapons trigger procs more often; slower weapons get more mana back from Aspect of the Viper per hit. Faster will be better in non-Viper situations, but otherwise it's a bit moot. Damage done by individual shots is normalized.

Should I use piece X or Y? Keep reading and you can decide for yourself!

b) Stat-related mathematical information:This will provide you with basic informatin on stats. For much more great and in-depth information go here.

45.9 crit rating = 1% crit chance.

1 Agi = 1 attack power + .012% crit.

32.79 haste rating = 1% haste = attack speed drops such that in the time it used to take to use an attack 100 times in a row, now you can do it 101 times. This is calculated by taking (attack speed) / (1+haste%).

The haste soft cap is at 15.94% haste (assuming you have a 15% quiver equipped). This is when Steady Shot's cast time reaches 1.5 seconds. After this point, Steady Shot's cast time is limited by the global cooldown; after this point, haste will only truly affect Auto Shot. The haste soft cap can be met with Serpent's Swiftness, Improved Moonkin Form, Swift Retribution, or haste from gear. (Note that Improved Moonkin Form and Swift Retribution, like all raid buffs, don't stack.)

32.79 hit rating = +1% hit chance, or, more accurately, -1% miss chance. See the article on the hit cap above for more information. You need 6% to cap hit in a heroic, and 8% to cap hit in a raid.

15.4 Armor Penetration rating = 1% armor ignored. I would worry about this stat a lot less. It will benefit you but not nearly as much as agility or attack power.

Expertise is useless to you. It only applies to melee. (No, it doesn't scale to your pet.) Do not take gear with Expertise at all costs; some exceptions may occur when the other stats are still better than what you've got on.

Strength is useless to you. It only applies to melee AP. (Only ranged AP scales to your pet.) Do not take gear with Strength at all costs; you will get more than laughed at. There are no excusable exceptions to this rule at endgame.

In general, when picking a ranged weapon, its tooltip DPS is the primary concern, followed by stats. Of two bows with equivalent DPS but different speeds, the slower one will return you slightly more mana in Aspect of the Viper, but the faster one will generate slightly more procs like Go for the Throat and Improved Aspect of the Hawk. So speed's essentially a tossup.

Note that your preferred stats in any given situation are extremely dependent on gear, buffs, and situation. For example, in a longer than usual fight, you would prefer Intellect more than normal so as to spend less time in Viper. It is always best to check the spreadsheet for your specific statistical preferences.

c) Gearing up:Go browse Wowhead! Like so. That will return all level 80 epic mail chestpieces that a Hunter can use, that don't have spell power or Strength on. That is, it will return every epic chestpiece you might ever care about. Browse gear for every slot and find some feasible gear to shoot for, using what you learned above. The comments on each item are generally a good resource. Try to eventually be able to correctly decide for yourself what gear you should be wearing, keeping the hit cap in mind.

Other good resources for gear choice are the other sticky threads in this forum. Check them out!

Post by Garry

:VI. Putting It All Together: How Do I Shot Bow?

All of the above is theory on how to maximize your DPS. In order to make it work, you have to actually cause maximum DPS correctly. How you do that depends on several factors; the method by which you perform your DPS (i.e. the order in which you fire your shots) is referred to as your shot rotation.

More Information:Priority rotations are the way to go: fire the shots that cause the most DPS first. This will be Explosive/Chimera, Aimed, multishot(if theres more then 1 NPC),Serpent, Arcane (unless you are Survival), and Steady, more or less in that order.

If you are not MM, refresh Serpent when it expires. If you are MM, fire Chimera Shot on cooldown: the tooltips are a bit misleading, Chimera - Serpent always does damage equal to 40% of the total damage that an entire Serpent Sting would do, not how much has been done already.

Frost trap does not currently activate the 30 second cooldown on LnL. Making it a far superior choice over Immolation trap.

On topic of LnL, the absolute best way to do it is to do 3 explosives back to back without clipping, but as long as you don't clip, it won't be much of a dps loss.

If you are Survival, and Lock and Load procs, you want to avoid overwriting existing Explosive Shot DoT ticks. Either wait a half second between firing Explosives so that the previous Explosive finishes ticking before your next one lands, or weave a different special in between Explosives. Don't waste LnL charges on Arcane Shot, this costs you a lot of damage.

b) Other Tips

Tips on being effective in a raid:

Pop all your cooldowns all the time, but only when you won't risk overtaking the tank in threat. You really don't want to have to FD when all your cooldowns are active. If you can, try to time your cooldowns so that they go off together when threat is not an issue. (The exception to this rule is that Trolls' Berserking and other haste effects should be used separately.) If you can't use all your cooldowns together, that's fine; you lose more by waiting to do so.

Know what's going on in any given fight. That means reading strategies, watching videos of those strategies, and knowing what everyone else's role is too, so you can be aware of exactly what's going to happen.

Misdirect properly and every time the cooldown is up. If there's more than one Hunter in a raid, designate one person to coordinate Misdirections over Ventrilo or in a separate chat channel.

With an undergeared tank, consider placing Scorpid Sting instead of Serpent Sting; what you sacrifice in DPS here may allow your tank to live through a fight if s/he is having trouble staying alive. However, Insect Swarm, a Druid talent in the Balance tree, is identical to Scorpid Sting and the two don't stack.

Heal yourself. Use bandages and Healthstones and potions. Use Mend Pet whenever necessary.

Follow the kill order designated by your raid leaders. Use Hunter's Mark on every mob that is being focused by the majority of the raid, if you have Improved Hunter's Mark and the glyph.

Feign Death often, as needed. Use a threat meter mod like Omen to track the threat of you and your raid members, so you can see when you are in danger of overtaking the tank in threat; most guilds require this regardless. Make sure your threat is cleared on Omen before you get back up; it might take a second and it's worth the wait. (Omen is available at Curse.)

Enchant Cloak – Greater SpeedI would recommend this to Beast Mastery hunters. Increased haste will benefit you a little bit more then Major Agility, not much but every little thing helps. If you meet the haste soft cap do not get this. Agility will be more important.

Enchant Cloak – Major AgilityThis is recommended for Survival and Marksmanship hunters. Agility is the main attribute all hunters should be focusing on. However it especially benefits Survival.Agility will benefit the following

Enchant 2H Weapon – ScourgebaneAs you notice this does give more attack power but only to undead. I would say this is a temporary enchant as it would be worthless if you not fighting undead. This enchant is especially good in Naxxramas.

Sunday, February 08, 2009 - Creation of thread and major foundation of thread is made.

Post by Janube

I figure you're done with reserved spots, as the last one was five minutes ago.

"Improved Tracking will bug you, I know because it bugged me! Always having to track a new target manually. The mod Track-o-Matique will automatically track the type of NPC you are attacking. You can download this mod from my other thread at this location. Hunter Addons/Mods!"

The talent was changed with 3.08. Now whenever you're tracking humanoids, dragons, giants, beasts, demons, elementals, or undead, you get the DPS buff against all of those types.

So as long as you track one of them, you don't have to switch unless you want to see their positions on the mini-map.

Post by FadedCadence

i understand that you're looking to cover all bases but going in-depth about bm first is just going to encourage people to use bm for raiding. you should emphasize survival first and foremost and not talk at length about bm and mm unless the changes in 3.1 present another paradigm shift in preferred raid specs.

you also need to mention that wasps will be the best dps pet if there is no minor armor debuff (faerie fire, curse of recklessness, sporebat's spore cloud). raptors would otherwise be the best dps pet regardless of spec; the only caveats are the wasp thing and cats being okay for survival too, lacking focused fire.

Post by Garry

This is a little sneak peak of the Endgame DPS/Mechanics Guide Reborn. Much more will be added later.

This was my very first sentence of my guide. Yes i'm obviously going to add a guide for survival.

Post by heritikyl

Expose Weakness 2/3Like I explained before we only get Expose Weakness 2/3 to ensure the buff does not over write itself. If this happens you have a worthless talent. point.

Actually you only stick 2 points in EW because that is enough to ensure near 100% uptime. Overriding itself is irrelevent.

Hunting Party 3/5Same exact explanation as Expose Weakness. I don't know whether to call his a core talent or a filler. Its great to have 3/5 because that keeps he buff on basically all the time, increasing your Mana regeneration incredibly. Again this is important because you want to minimize the time you are in viper.

You can get away with 2/5 which will also keep near 100% uptime.

Post by Nanex

I'm glad to see this reborn. Leth did a great thing with his guide and hopefully this one can be just as good. Be sure to add more general info such as stuff on stacking stats and hit ratings etc..

EDIT: Typos

Post by Garry

Expose Weakness 2/3Like I explained before we only get Expose Weakness 2/3 to ensure the buff does not over write itself. If this happens you have a worthless talent. point.

Actually you only stick 2 points in EW because that is enough to ensure near 100% uptime. Overriding itself is irrelevent.

Hunting Party 3/5Same exact explanation as Expose Weakness. I don't know whether to call his a core talent or a filler. Its great to have 3/5 because that keeps he buff on basically all the time, increasing your Mana regeneration incredibly. Again this is important because you want to minimize the time you are in viper.

You can get away with 2/5 which will also keep near 100% uptime.

Overwriting itself is not irrelevant at all. If its not then why don't you put 3/3 in expose weakness? Because then its a waste. I suppose it Hunting Party 2/5 would do alright but just to ensure that its always on I like 3/5 and theres really no other core talents it can be placed into anyway. It would just be another filler same as this.

Post by Shiyami

Just wanted to say thanks for bringing back a wonderful guide! I look forward to seeing all the kinks worked out and all the little useful extras added in! :) Keep up the good work!

Post by Hungryshadow

Garry, might want to copy and paste the whole thing and run it through Word to root out spelling mistakes/big grammar thingies ^^

Nice job so far...sure as heck beating me on my pet Guide, ran 3 heroics this morning with my DK trying to get him up /shudder.

Post by Eneder

Looks good. The only thing I'm missing is that in IV. Gear and Items, part 1 you don't mention that Spell Power is useless too. Also, like FadedCadence said, try to give a small overwiew of the current highest dps spec before you're gonna talk about the different spec's.

Post by heritikyl

Overwriting itself is not irrelevant at all. If its not then why don't you put 3/3 in expose weakness? Because then its a waste.

You don't put the third point in because it is better spent elsewhere because 2/3 will ensure near 100% uptime anyway.

A couple other things I noticed:

Herbalism comes in third with 66.7 AP on average (though it requires the use of consumables*) along with a weak self heal, this can however be usefull in raids. Use on boss fights when ever its up to give the healers less to worry about.

Fireleaf no longer has a use thus Herbalism is, for raiding purposes, useless.

Explosive/Chimera, Serpent, Arcane (unless you are Survival), Aimed, and Steady, more or less in that order.

Aimed / Multi goes before Serpent sting. Serpent sting is only used when all other shots are on CD but before Steady Shot (assuming it has fallen off the target).

Hyena. Your pet wont be doing as much DPS as it would if it were a cat or raptor. However this is not the role of a Trap Dancer. You get the Hyena for its special ability Tendon Rip. This slows the enemy by 50% for 6 seconds and its only a 20 second cool down. This is amazing for kiting. The spell also does a little bit of damage. Pet Talent tree below.

Of course you realize that Tendon Rip doesn't affect bosses, right? I would avoid writing stuff like this unless you preface it by saying this is for solo play / PvP only.

You might want to say the hit cap is 263 or 8% without Focused Aim.

Post by Hungryshadow

You two. Stop arguing the same point. You two both agree that 2/3 is all that's needed to keep Expose Weakness up. Good.

Post by Raijin17

"The two smartest gathering professions till 80 would be herbalism and blacksmithing. I'll normally try and devote 12 hours of gathering a week at least."

I assume you meant to put Mining, not Blacksmithing as mining is the actual gathering profession. Just a small typo i noticed int he first paragraph of the professions section.

Post by FadedCadence

You two. Stop arguing the same point. You two both agree that 2/3 is all that's needed to keep Expose Weakness up. Good.

but the reasoning is important; garry had used a fallacy to defend 2/3. leth gave this expression for refreshable proc uptime, applicable to expose, hunting party, master tac, iaoth, and so forth.

1 - (chance to not proc on any given shot) ^ (number of potential procs during buff uptime)

refreshing the buff is the entire point. if the buff is not refreshed, it expires, and you lose uptime, and therefore dps. judging from leth's posts, he would certainly make this distinction clear.

Post by Killerrabbit

This spec for obvious reason(EG the name) is a Trap dancing spec. This means that your the hunter that traps in instances and raids. You don't normally ever want to be this spec unless you are required to by your guild, or if you some how enjoy it. Note this spec is not DPS.

Trap dancing specs are very competitive, if not better than a regular shooting spec.

Unleashed Fury was removed in order to make points available for Survival Instincts 2/2 and Barrage 2/3Unleashed Fury increases your pets damage. This is really the last thing you need because your main DPS source is your bow/gun.

Unless you let your pet die, unleashed fury is better than SI/Barrage for DPS as MM.

Since Serpent Sting's damage is calculated only when you cast it, and not re-calculated when your AP changes, it is best for MM to build up as much AP as possible via cooldowns before firing their Serpent Sting; then, Chimera - Serpent will do more damage for the entire fight.

I'm fairly certain that has been changed since 3.0.8 to have its damage checked every time you cast chimera.

Trapdancing specs will drop Immo Trap on cooldown as well.

Frost trap actually. Frost trap does not currently activate the 30 second cooldown on LnL. Making it a far superior choice.

On topic of LnL, the absolute best way to do it is to do 3 explosives back to back without clipping, but as long as you don't clip, it won't be much of a dps loss.

Post by Garry

Thanks guys for all the corrects. Takes ages to get anything done so bear with me here. I'll try and fix my mistakes the best I can.

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